Evelyn Dunbar

(British, 1906-1960)

Princess Caroline 35.5 x 30.5 cm. (14 x 12 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, U.K.

In the mid to late 1950s, in what were to be the last years of her life, Dunbar applied herself sporadically to a long-held ambition, the creation of books of rhymes and stories, games and activities for children. Having no children of her own, she enlisted friends and their children to help her in these compilations. The most likely collaborator in Princess Caroline was a schoolfriend from 35 years before, Constance Breed (as she later became), wife of the Rector of March, Cambridgeshire, and her children.

None of these projects were ever completed. Dunbar died in 1960 at the age of 53. The only insight we have into them are the many sketches she left behind of children skipping, leap-frogging, playing tag, hiding and seeking, and so on. Exceptional is a sketch entitled Princess Caroline (fig.1), in which a girl is washing her long blonde hair in a tub out of doors. In the lower left-hand corner of the sketch the same figure - we can suppose - is standing inside a tulip flower and is looking out, as though from a ship's crow's nest.

Princess Caroline, not the best-known of children's rhymes, runs:

Princess, Princess Caroline,
Washed her hair in Cowslip wine.
Cowslip wine makes it shine:
Princess, Princess Caroline.

(The original, or perhaps the parody, of this fairly ancient rhyme was scurrilously applied to the future wife of George II, Princess Caroline of Anspach, substituting 'turpentine' for 'cowslip wine'.)

In the oil version of Princess Caroline we have the subject, again standing in the tulip flower, allowing her long blonde hair, freshly washed and shining, to hang over the edge of a petal. Given the work and thought that went into Dunbar's composition, it seems very likely that she intended it, suitably reproduced, to feature prominently in an eventually unfinished collection of sometimes unfamiliar children's rhymes, maybe as the frontispiece. The frame appears originally to have enclosed Dunbar's similarly-sized Woman and a Dog, exhibited in the 1947 winter exhibition of the New English Art Club, and whose label is partly visible on the back.

With thanks to Emeritus Professor Kenneth McConkey for his input.

We are grateful to Christopher Campbell-Howes, author of Evelyn Dunbar, A Life in Painting, for compiling this catalogue entry.